


To The Death

by Robertdoc



Category: Booksmart (2019)
Genre: Canon Lesbian Relationship, F/F, Friendship, Homophobic Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-25 01:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20024488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Robertdoc/pseuds/Robertdoc
Summary: Amy and Hope's first date after Amy returns from Botswana is interrupted by a homophobic onlooker - whose slurs are also overheard by Gigi.Gigi, who's acted out in defense of the very few people she considers her friends, against threats that were all in her head - so what the hell is she bound to do when the threat is real this time?Post movie, Amy's POV, potential triggering homophobic language





	To The Death

It couldn’t be this easy. Or rather, Amy wondered if she really had to keep telling herself it couldn’t be this easy for much longer.

In all honesty, it really couldn’t be this...perfect. But if it already had been perfect for this long, and it had gotten her to this point, then….

It got her to a year in Botswana without any lion attacks, persecutions or regrets about delaying Columbia. It got her eight months of weekly phone calls and six months of bi-weekly Skype sessions with Hope once her insecurities finally backed off. It got her that surprise week-long in-person visit from Hope, which included…a few things with just the right angles this time around.

And in her first hours back home, she got her perfect in-person reunions with both Molly and Hope. Now 48 hours later, she was getting what she was finally brave enough to label/potentially jinx as her and Hope’s first American date.

Granted, she and Hope were only sharing a booth and a few slices at Lidos Pizza. But maybe that helped take the pressure off just enough to ease her into labeling it. Yet if the label was bothering Hope so far, it didn’t show.

Amy could only see the same hot, sometimes bitchy, but now more often than not heart-eyed face she had mostly seen on a screen this past year. Still, as that one special week proved and tonight was reinforcing in spades, seeing it all on a screen was nothing compared to seeing it five feet away or much, much closer.

A phone or laptop screen wasn’t enough to fully capture how Hope’s face looked in the throes of laughter, in the heat of an annoyed ramble, or in its stillness when she truly paid attention to her. When she was actually impressed with her stories and speeches. And when she actually looked at Amy like she was the one lucky to be right here, right now.

It just couldn’t be this easy. Amy had to keep telling herself that just in case….right?

After years of slowly building towards coming out, then two years of ultimately useless pining – to say nothing of the most gut-wrenching, infuriating, exhilarating, humiliating and courageous half-hour of her life to end the most important night of her life – it was only right to wonder if one perfect year after all that was pushing it before some kind of shoe dropped.

But if it wasn’t….

Then all she had was Hope. Right here, right now.

Hope, the basic hot mega bitch who actually needed all that bitchiness to hide a soft spot for little old her. Hope, who let herself show all kinds of dimensions she never showed anyone else but little old her. Hope, who kissed, smiled, fucking hugged and was now gazing at little old, dorky, awkward, smart, clumsy, clueless, meek, sometimes cowardly and only recently independent her like she was something so…so….

Perfect. Like that was so easy for her to do.

Maybe it was. Maybe that said something in of itself.

Hope already trusted her with seeing so much of her that almost no one else did. So maybe Amy owed that kind of trust in her in return. Trust that she knew what she was doing when she looked at her this way, that she thoroughly thought it through before deciding to feel this safe with her, and that she deserved nothing less but equal trust in her – and them – too.

Trust that maybe the longest lucky streak of her life wasn’t overdue to end horribly, just because of past humiliations. That even if it did, there wouldn’t only be Molly to stay by her side, pick her up and make her feel special enough to keep going this time. That she really did have a girlfriend who already thought she was….

She had a girlfriend.

Somehow, under a year of online chats in other countries didn’t make it finally sink in. Yet three days and one little date at a pizza place back home did. Go figure.

“What, you nerd?”

Well, whatever epiphany Amy had was clearly all over her face. She now had a girlfriend who could clearly notice stuff like that. Something else to file away for future reference.

Yet for everything Amy realized and filed away in her big brain, her slightly smaller mouth could only reply with the word “Nothing.”

She knew by now there was only a limited supply of mushy stuff Hope could stand to hear in public – although it was a bit more liberal behind closed doors. But she also knew that mushy looks to say what would be too corny or lame to put into words for Hope were still a-ok.

Indeed, whatever mushy look she had on now seemed to be a-ok to her. Maybe it was all a-ok.

Amy was on a real date in America, with a real girlfriend who liked her despite only liking a few other people, and who was once again looking at her like the word “like” didn’t do justice to what she really felt.

Maybe this was just life now.

Maybe this time it didn’t have to go away with one argument, one socially awkward mishap, or one scene she was never supposed to see in…a pool or something. Maybe something so good didn’t have to be balanced out by some future horror that reset the universe.

It could be that easy, if Amy felt safe enough to realize it could.

Seeing Hope still wearing that amused, disbelieving smile in the midst of Amy’s inner debate – and feeling the same kind of smile on her own face – was just about chipping away those final lingering, old neurotic Amy echoes.

And then new Amy and Hope heard it.

“Fucking dykes are everywhere now….”

It was a rather quiet night at Lidos. That wasn’t because Amy and Hope were too wrapped up in each other to notice anyone else, but because there were pretty much no other customers. As far as Amy or Hope could see, there was no one else sitting in any other booth, and the only other person here who didn’t work here was standing nearby, still waiting for his order to go.

Which eliminated any other suspects.

“Excuse me?” Amy said with a sudden burst of outrage – which faded away the second the culprit looked at her.

It shouldn’t have surprised her that this man wasn’t wearing a red hat, wasn’t dressed in overalls, and didn’t have the more stereotypical features of a man who’d be more likely to say…that line. Then again, maybe his more clean-cut look was the more fitting stereotype of a man who’d feel free to say that these days.

That realization took the last bit of courage out of Amy, as she waited for some kind of conformation or denial.

“You know what, never mind. You might as well have this now,” which wasn’t either. Yet that in itself was less than reassuring.

“I mean, after they get done with the immigrants in the camps, they’ll round up dykes like you next. Now that I can’t wait to watch.”

Despite how sheltered her life was in the first two years after coming out, Amy had been to too many protests to have never been called a dyke or worse before tonight. Even when she spent most of her life in books and Molly’s room, she knew enough to know she would frequently hear such words to her face many, many times in her life. She knew enough to know and prepare for that being part of the deal in some form.

But this was uncharted territory. This was her first date with any girl in America, and really in public. And it had brought this on.

It brought on the slurs of a man who, for all Amy knew, was working out right now how to stalk them on their way home, abduct them and do God knows what. Maybe he thought he could just go ahead and attack them right here right now and nothing would happen – all of history and especially the recent parts suggested he’d be on to something.

If Amy stayed silent, maybe he’d be a little less tempted to think that way. But staying silent in the face of such hate went against everything she ever believed in. Yet voicing such beliefs never gave her a 50-50 chance of getting raped, killed or worse before now. To say nothing of Hope….

…fuck, Hope….

Wouldn’t being meek right now, when it really counted, back up everything Hope used to say and pretend to believe – or so she thought she was pretending – about her? But wouldn’t trying to be tough for her put them in more danger, and really let a walking aggressive male stereotype win by playing to his level?

Yet wouldn’t that be easier to live with than tempting the possibility of something they couldn’t live through?

Why wasn’t Hope speaking up either way? Was she scared too, or just silently disappointed that her own girlfriend – so she thought she was – wouldn’t stand up for her, herself or all gay people?

Molly would have already chewed him out by now. But then would she be at risk too? How much more worse would that be? How much worse could this be? How much worse could she be in keeping quiet – or how much worse could she get if she spoke out?

Amy knew and should have remembered that it couldn’t be this easy. But it’s not fair that it was inevitable it had to be this kind of hard. Yet it’s not like she could feign ignorance that it would be. What good did that do her or Hope now, though?

Maybe it was best to just go. Maybe Hope’s shame over her wouldn’t be that much harder to deal with than her own shame. Maybe she could rationalize her cowardice better with some distance, and with the bitter knowledge that no one else was going to try and do better than she did anyway….

“HEY!!”

That…that didn’t come from the homophobe. So that was some relief.

Amy finally brought herself to look at Hope for the first time in the last minute. Whatever that look on her face was, it certainly didn’t indicate the scream came from her either.

And of course, the workers in the kitchen and on the registers were still quiet. So who…

And then Amy turned towards the other booths. Which still looked empty, save for….someone rising up like some kind of zombie. Someone who seemed to have been lying on their back on an entire seat until now. Someone with long brunette hair, a cap on it, furs and glitter on the rest of her….

….no.

No, even for her, this was too much. Even whatever kind of fucking magic she had to be everywhere couldn’t have brought her right here, right now. It just wasn’t….

“Gigi?!”

Well, Hope saying it out loud ended all hopes of denial.

It wasn’t like Amy hadn’t heard from Gigi since graduation. Thanks to Molly and Jared, Gigi was able to get a hold of her quite often, sometimes even after sunrise in Botswana time. They talked enough – or had enough of what passed for back-and-forth conversations in Gigi language – for Amy to know Gigi would be back home for the summer as well, though she hadn’t heard from her since getting back.

Yet here she was now. Interrupting the most frightening moment of her life. With…

….with a look that wasn’t the kind of spacey, otherworldly look she saw from Gigi 99 percent of the time.

This was more like that 1 percent. The percent where Gigi thought that guy on Jared’s yacht was insulting Amy. The insult she made up completely in her head, in order to pretend the guy wasn’t really telling her not to smoke – or so Amy thought at the time.

This time Amy really had been insulted, far worse than any insult Gigi imagined. And this time…Gigi actually looked much angrier.

“How DARE you say that to my BEST friend….”

Fuck, she sounded angrier too. And not a wacked out, vitamin fueled, Asian-waska influenced kind of angry. Real angry.

What the fuck?

“Who the hell are you?” the homophobe spoke out loud.

“Wrong fucking answer,” Gigi responded. Yet she spoke even louder when she climbed up onto the top of her booth.

Then when she started running across the row of booths leading towards Amy and Hope’s booth, and to the understandably confused and now somewhat terrified homophobe next to them. “What the fuck?” he yelled out in leu of actually running.

Amy merely couldn’t understand why Gigi needed to run and jump across the booth tables, instead of making it much easier by running on the floor. Until she remembered this was Gigi. Then again, this was the first time Gigi was acting like Gigi in here since Amy noticed her.

Or maybe not….

“TO THE DEATH!!”

Wait, was she doing a fucking swan dive off the booth behind them?

Yes, she was. But she wasn’t landing in any water this time. Rather, she landed right on the back of the homophobe who didn’t have enough sense to run away.

He was certainly running around now. Not that it was doing any good at getting Gigi off him. She just seemed to cling tighter to him the more he tried to shake her off, as her legs had a vice grip around his waist and her right arm was wrapped around his neck.

As for her left arm, it was reaching into her fur coat pocket. For a second, Amy’s voice almost worked again to tell her not to slash or shoot him, for her sake only.

But instead of a gun or knife or glass bottle, she pulled out a….pepper shaker. The same kind of pepper shaker that was on the booths. At least that wasn’t a weapon.

Yet Amy stood corrected once Gigi started pouring pepper right into her captive’s eyes.

Amy almost started talking again when the homophobe ran around blinded, yet Gigi still didn’t let him shake her off. It was only when he ran out of the building that Amy finally moved a muscle, issued a half-hearted apology to the staff just in case, and ran out with Hope close behind to see the end of the battle.

By the time they got to the parking lot, Gigi was finally off the homophobe’s back. It was clear she only got off by choice, however, judging by the fact the homophobe was running further and further away from all of them, free and apparently desperate to stay that way.

It didn’t stop Gigi from pulling out a salt shaker from her pocket and flinging that at the retreating man. Even if it actually hit him, it wouldn’t have done the damage of Gigi’s other moves, yet it didn’t seem to faze her.

“You just wait and see what my ghost babies can do with cinnamon shakers! You hear me?!” Gigi shouted out at the man who was long gone.

Yet Amy and Hope still remained behind her. At the moment, however, only Amy felt reckless enough to creep towards her.

Amy could guess that Gigi knew she was approaching. Nonetheless, she wasn’t moving. In fact, she was staying still in one place, probably for the first time since Amy knew her. In further fact, she still had her fists clenched, although the threat was long passed.

Amy was just starting to feel immune to shock at Gigi’s brand of crazy. Yet this was the kind of crazy that she couldn’t have possibly seen coming, even from Gigi.

Or should she?

Naturally, Gigi chose that moment to spin around and face her. Yet the sudden movement wasn’t nearly as startling to Amy as what she saw afterwards.

Gigi looked at her not with a far out look, or that look she got when she saw Amy’s hair and thought of her vitamins, or even a look that suggested her mind was already on the next party. This wasn’t any kind of regular old Gigi look at all.

She looked at Amy with just plain regular old concern. A look that asked her if she was all right without actually asking it out loud. A look that suggested she actually remembered what that guy said to her and Hope, and was worried her big attack wasn’t enough to make the hurt and fear go away.

It was the look a regular old friend would have given her at a time like this. Maybe even one that rivaled one of Molly’s looks. But it was from Gigi, which was….which was…

Was it?

Jared flat out told Molly, probably knowing it would eventually get back to Amy, that Gigi was the most loyal person he ever met. She heard the stories that were so similar to the one Amy witnessed on the yacht, all of Gigi acting out in defense of Jared although the threats were all in her head.

Yet this threat to Amy and Hope tonight was not in Gigi’s head. Nevertheless, she acted out even more zealously. Like she knew what she was doing, and had a reason for it other than just being Gigi. Or the Gigi that she was 99 percent of the time.

But the 1 percent….

Gigi might not have official friends other than Jared, and still may well have kept reaching out to Amy because of vitamin memories. Maybe it didn’t bother her as much as Jared guessed it did, or maybe it did more than even he knew. Maybe it was just impossible for anyone to honestly understand a mind like Gigi’s, including Gigi.

Nonetheless, looking at Gigi right now, in combination with the Gigi of the last 90 seconds or so, made a big part of it click for Amy. And it honestly made her stupid for not fully getting it earlier.

With all her party magic, her impossible insight, and her whole Manic Pixie Party Girl personality, it was pretty hard to see Gigi as an actual human being 99 percent of the time. Maybe that was how she wanted it. But that 1 percent….

….that 1 percent of a person who didn’t have many friends and perhaps didn’t want many of them beyond epic parties…yet when she had them, she ferociously protected them and stood up for them when they couldn’t stand up for themselves, regardless of whether or not it was actually necessary…

But to see her do it when it was actually necessary, and do it for her….in a situation like that against a bigot like that…to have someone who didn’t seem to care about anything other than the night life care about her like that, even when the threat was truly real….

Being cared for deeply by someone who cared about almost no one else was special enough from Hope. It wasn’t like that from Gigi, although she wouldn’t be surprised if Gigi thought it was. Yet whatever Gigi kind of special this was…

Amy thought she already learned her classmates were more fully human and complex than she ever used to give them credit for. Perhaps she never fully extended that to Gigi, and perhaps few could have blamed her.

Or maybe…maybe someone more supernaturally alive than any of them was also as real, and as much of a real friend, as any of them. And at what was otherwise a truly horrible ordeal, Amy may have officially become a new member of the exclusive few who were allowed to see it.

Partly because she was too scared to stand up for herself before Gigi did it, but that would surely be dwelled upon later. For now, though…

“Gigi, I…” Amy started to say, before Hope finished in a way Amy wasn’t exactly planning to.

“Gigi, what the fuck?” Hope spoke in more than one word for the first time in minutes. “I mean, that was, but still….what the fuck?! How and why and….what?!”

Now that was more along the lines of a regular reaction to Gigi. In response, Gigi’s face transformed back to its usual inscrutable, mysterious glare, which Amy didn’t know whether to feel relieved or sorry about.

She learned more towards her old normal state of confusion once Gigi reached to touch her hair. This really didn’t seem like the best time for Gigi to taste it, though Amy almost hoped it was more because she still thought her vitamins were in it, and less because she felt she needed to brush past her seemingly uncharacteristic moment of vulnerability.

None of those options seemed to answer why Gigi was taking Amy’s hair and brushing it over Hope’s nose, though.

“Gigi, the fuck?!” Hope slightly shortened, though it didn’t deter Gigi from tickling her nose with Amy’s hair some more. “Come on, I know her hair smells great, but what’s that have to do with anything now?”

Instead of answering the actual question, Gigi lit up into a bright smile and proclaimed breathlessly to Hope, “You are the one…”

For her part, Amy tried to mentally translate her Gigi speak and act into regular English, which she was getting faster at lately. By the time she was fast enough to identity a possible translation that was kind of sweet, hopeful and had implications that looked way too far ahead, Gigi had already pulled her and Hope into a shared hug.

“You don’t need me anymore,” Gigi whispered into Amy’s ear. “But I expect you to use Jared’s yacht for your bachelorette party, okay?”

Before Amy’s mind could get around that, she felt Gigi’s head turn to Hope’s ear and whisper, “You be good to her in this life, but all bets are off in the next one. Then we’ll break the tie in the one after that, okay?”

Gigi gave them one more big squeeze, pulled back and asked “Now how far did my salt shaker get to?” then left before Amy, Hope or anyone else Gigi might have been asking could answer.

It was a rare case of Amy seeing where Gigi was going before she disappeared into thin air. Still, that bit of history was way down on the totem pole of things to be amazed at right now.

Whatever Amy and Hope were most amazed at, they kept it to themselves for 5 minutes before they finally got to Hope’s car, then stayed silent for the first 15 minutes of the drive back to her house.

Regardless of how comfortable the silence between them was or wasn’t, Amy started to feel less comfortable about herself the more she looked back on everything, just as she expected. Between that and Gigi being more and less like Gigi during Amy’s inaction, it finally made Amy blurt out something she never expected to think, let alone say.

“How insane is it if I wished I was more like Gigi?”

Once that sunk in for both of them, Amy leapt to clarify, “I mean…more like Gigi when it really counts for something…”

Before Amy could lose herself in imaginary thoughts of Hope actually wishing she was more like Gigi, or of her disappointment in her, or of her calling her a meek coward and meaning it this time, Hope’s real-life words told a far different story.

“At least you said two words to the guy. Hell of a lot more than I could think of.”

Shit, shit, shit. In all of Amy’s panic over her silence, it didn’t occur to her that Hope was even more quiet and perhaps even more scared. “Oh God, I’m sorry, are you okay?” Amy overcompensated quickly.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Hope said with a bit of her old pre-Nick’s party snippiness, before she softened into a more recognizable post-graduation look and voice.

“I knew that shit might happen at some point. It’s one thing to expect it and see it all the time in movies and the news. It’s another to…”

“…be the target of it,” Amy finished.

“And next time….and there’s gonna be a next time…we might not have a Gigi to bail us out,” Hope concluded.

“Well, no one else has a Gigi either,” Amy deflected, before giving her next answer more careful thought.

“But….we’re the kind of people who somehow got the most….seemingly self-absorbed party girl in the universe to genuinely love us,” Amy exclaimed. “And I got the terror of the class of 2019 to….somehow really care about me,” she continued a bit more carefully.

Amy made sure to go on before Hope could correct her in some form. “And I have parents who should fall under every other homophobic cliché in the book, but who still love every part of me! And you have the biggest, most caring heart that anyone who’s lucky enough to be allowed to see it has ever seen! If all those things are possible…maybe some other scary things will be possible to overcome too.”

Amy hoped she didn’t sound too unsure at the end. Spontaneous speeches she didn’t plan out weeks in advance for a debate or assembly still weren’t her strong suit quite yet.

On the other hand, Hope argued, “Boy, when you do speak out, you go big….then again, if I didn’t already figure that out a year ago…” which was a pretty damn good argument to Amy.

Then Hope had to go and top it with, “But please…don’t you think you have to say anything if you’re too scared, just for me. Okay? No one else has a Gigi, but I want to keep an Amy for a while longer, all right?”

Amy felt her mouth curl up into her mushy Hope smile again, relieving her greatly that she could still do that tonight. She also knew that was probably Hope’s mush limit for tonight, so she didn’t try to surpass her own any further.

Amy knew all along this couldn’t be that easy, and she was right all along. There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t get too hard to handle next time or the time after that, Gigi or no Gigi. But then again, stranger things had happened.

Strange but increasingly normal things like her having a girlfriend. And stranger but somehow still normal things like the demented but true friendship of the loopiest, yet most ferociously loyal person outside of Molly that this town had ever known. And the less strange knowledge that there were other special people in their lives who would do what Gigi did if they had to, if not quite so physically.

Either way, Amy would find her own way to fight the world to keep all of it too.

Figuratively, and hopefully not quite literally, to the death.


End file.
